A grab bag of software can still be found in electronics stores alongside last season's tax return software. Illustrious products such as greeting card creators and the like accompany jaded graphic and video suites and font packages. Although you will find hardly any counterparts to these titles in the free software world, you do have some more intelligent alternatives.

When the task is creating invitations and place cards for an event, some Linux users might wish they had some of these Windows programs. They make life easy, with ready-made design templates into which you only have to enter names. With a little ingenuity, though, you can just as easily use gLabels [1].

First published more than 15 years ago and updated constantly, the first version of this program was intended for designing and printing labels and business cards like those available commercially. However, just as most people can manage to knock a nail into the wall with a pair of pliers, if need be, gLabels will let you create totally different and no less professional-looking printed materials. Although, gLabels is not a mature desktop publishing program like Scribus, the opportunities it offers are fine for the task at hand, and the learning curve is pleasantly flat.

The program can be found in the repositories of mainstream distributions. The current version 3.4.0 was released in April 2016, so it is likely available in the repositories – or, you can build gLabels from source (see the "Compiling gLabels" box). The mail merge function has been around for years, so the task at hand can be completed even with far older versions of the software.

Ready, Set, Print

After starting the program, go to the File | New menu and select the template that meets your needs. For this example, you can choose a label or card template freely from the collection.

The Generic brand in the left drop-down menu (Figure 1) contains a few common paper formats, such as the A6 format, which acts as the template in this example. After clicking Next, select the orientation (Normal or Rotated, i.e., portrait or landscape) and begin to unleash your ideas for the design.

Figure 1: The generic templates include paper formats, typically in ISO or US standards.

Enabling the grid in the background (View | Grid) generally makes it easier to arrange individual objects. First, you need text, such as: "You are cordially invited to Tom and Diana's New Year's Eve party at 7:00pm." With the mail merge feature, you can invite many other guests without repeatedly entering the salutation and names, which greatly simplifies the process.

You can store the names of your guests in an external text file in the comma-separated value () format, which you can export from a spreadsheet, or you can even create the list in a simple text editor. Write each salutation and the corresponding names, separated by a comma, one after another in rows (Figure 2). The comma acts as the delimiter; the application accepts spaces in the rows without problem.

Figure 2: gLabels processes the data for your guests' names and addresses from lines of text in a simple format.

Fresh Text

Now you can insert the text into the drawing area in gLabels by clicking the T in the toolbar or by accessing Objects | Create | Text through the menubar. Clicking on the drawing area lets you create a suitable object whose properties you can edit in the panel on the right.

To size the text frame properly, drag the green handles, and to move the text box, mouse over the border between the green handles and press and hold the left mouse button while dragging.

The text itself needs a little more attention: A decorative font in an appealing size, possibly centered on the page, adds a more aesthetic touch to your invitation. You will find the appropriate settings in the Style tab in the properties panel. Another interesting option here is the Shadow tab, where you can add a shadow in a freely selectable color and offset to the text. The software does not blur the shadow, so you should use the effects sparingly. Too little contrast and too much offset could make the text illegible. The x and y offsets can be adjusted in a granular way in increments of thousandths of an inch or tenths of a millimeter; adjusting the Opacity also improves readability.

You can insert objects, such as images, lines, and borders with or without a fill color to your heart's content. All of these objects can be accessed directly from the toolbar. Useful graphics and images are also available in the public domain (e.g., check out the Openclipart project [3]).

If you are a little too bold in your placement of objects and lose sight of one, remember that it's not really gone – just covered up by other objects, because each object has its own layer. You can bring a layer to the front or send it to the back in the Objects | Order menu. Figure 3 shows what the example looks like with a color-filled box in the background, a shaded and colored font, and a small graphic.

Figure 3: The invitation offers some potential for improvement, but it isn't bad for a first draft.

Batch Processing

This draft of the invitation only takes care of one invitation. To incorporate mail merge for personalized invitations, open the Objects | Merge properties menu (Figure 4). As the Format, select CSV; you may notice that the menu supports quite a few more formats, such as TSV, which uses a tab as the delimiter. For Location, specify the previously created CSV file. You could even access your Evolution address book, although you would need to add a salutation.

Figure 4: Setting up the name list for processing in your mail merge document.

In the properties panel in the main window, a previously inactive Insert merge field option is now ready for use, so you only need to replace the names in the text with variables. Two entries appear: one for the salutation and one for the name. Figure 5 shows what the text looks like after this step.

Figure 5: The inserted variables pave the way for batch processing of entries from the CSV file.

Now it's time for a first print preview. Select the printer icon in the toolbar and press the Preview button in the resulting window. Your variables are of variable length, so you can't be sure how much space the text will occupy in the salutation box. Figure 6 clearly shows how the nobility still requires special attention today.

Figure 6: An excessively long name can mess up the layout, so you should always inspect the print preview.